A quarter of a century after their war came to an end, the United States and Vietnam on Thursday launched a new era of normal economic ties with a trade deal that would grant Americans sweeping rights to do business in a land where they once shed blood, while giving Vietnamese much easier access to the rich U.S. marketplace.

Sen. John McCain stunned his Vietnamese hosts Friday, saying the "wrong guys" had won the Vietnam War and questioning this country's desire for closer relations with the United States. Even U.S. officials here were taken aback by the timing and bluntness of McCain's comments, which they feared could upset the fragile but improving relationship between Washington and Hanoi.

In a throwback to Cold War-era strategies, Vietnam's Communist government today begins a daily satellite TV broadcast to North America aimed at expatriate Vietnamese. While skeptics question the broadcast's impact, timing of the kickoff--three days before the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon--has inflamed passions among Vietnamese emigres who view Vietnam's "Liberation Day," April 30, as the blackest day in what they call Black April.

Finally, by April 1975, there was something about Vietnam that almost everyone could agree on. After a wrenching decade of bloodshed and protest, the end of the war was near. The Communist North Vietnamese army was sweeping south in violation of a treaty signed two years earlier in Paris, an accord President Nixon had heralded as bringing "peace with honor." America's combat role was over.

In another of its ongoing breaks from the past, Vietnam has chosen English over French and Russian as the favored foreign language for students to learn and has turned to its former ideological enemies in the West to help redesign the educational curriculum. Vietnam is already phasing out English-language textbooks written by Russian advisors in the mid-1980s.

As the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, old foes are searching for ways to build a new relationship on common ground. For one Viet Cong war hero, that's Jane Fonda. Lt. Gen. Phan Trung Kien, a senior member of the Vietnamese military leadership who rarely ventures into the public eye, met Wednesday with Defense Secretary William S. Cohen as the American ended the first trip to Vietnam by a U.S. defense chief in nearly 30 years.

For nearly a decade, Dr. Co Pham has advocated reconciliation and free trade between the United States and Vietnam, engendering such fierce protests in Orange County's Little Saigon community that he hired armed guards to protect his medical clinic. Now, as the two nations edge closer to a sweeping trade accord nearly 25 years after the Vietnam War's end, the native of Hanoi has stepped up his controversial campaign.

Enough with this talk of millennia. Let's go back to taking things one year at a time. That's especially wise for Asia and for the American role there. A year is time enough for six separatist rebellions in Indonesia, five North Korean extortions, four Japanese governments, three Hong Kong court rulings pledging subservience to China, two Chinese political crackdowns and one (short-lived) Chinese opening--not to mention half a dozen switches in Asia policy by the Clinton administration.

Three months after Hanoi and Washington struck a landmark deal to normalize economic ties, two deadlines for signing the formal agreement have passed, raising fears both sides could end up empty-handed after years of tough negotiations. To many political analysts, the delay is confirmation that the debate rages on between reformists and conservatives in the secretive Politburo over the fundamental question of whether Vietnam really wants to commit itself to a free-market economy.

Shadowed by the ghosts of the past, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright formally dedicated a new $3.3-million U.S. Consulate building here Tuesday, just a few paces from the site of the embassy where U.S. diplomats scrambled into helicopters in a chaotic retreat 24 years ago. "The United States and Vietnam will forever be linked by history," Albright said at the consulate ceremony.